Unhappy Hookers Haunt Gershon

She’s bored talking to birds, too.

Gina Gershon is an animal person, not a ghost person. She recorded an album about the harrowing search for her missing cat and performed it, cabaret style, at the Box. And at a recent dinner for painter Hunt Slonem’s new photo book about his many houses, she spent an inordinate amount of time trying to talk to Slonem’s exotic birds. “They said hello,” she says. “I said hello. They said hello. We didn’t have much of a conversation, we just kept saying hello back and forth. I think they do need to expand their vocabulary a little bit.” As for her poltergeist aversion, she discovered it when she lived in a haunted East 57th Street apartment as an NYU student. “I saw ghosts there,” she says. “It used to be a brothel, and the son had killed a couple of the prostitutes.” The restless spirits, Gershon claims, led her into some bad decorating choices. “I painted my room pink and green for some reason,” she says. “Maybe it was The Shining. I sort of went crazy. What was I thinking?” She moved to Mott Street.